Jewelry designer Jordane Somville opened a boutique in June 2024 in Paris where she offers workshops in a setting designed as an experimental laboratory. A great idea to start the year 2025 by trying a Do It Yourself experience.
Jordane Somville is a jewelry designer, stylist and ceramist. His multidisciplinary background and his passion for art have allowed him to develop a style combining aesthetics, innovation and emotion.
A graduate in fashion design from the Duperré School of Applied Arts, she completed her training with a master’s degree in creative design and contemporary technology. After ten years of experience in the field of costume jewelry, she created her eponymous brand by turning to ceramics. In addition to porcelain, the designer combines metal in her jewelry collections where the pieces are plated in 18-carat gold for a touch of elegance. Among the unique materials that enrich his creations, we also find preserved flowers.
She opened her boutique in June 2024 at 60 rue Hermel, in Paris, and offers several workshops open to the public. At a time when doing it yourself benefits from a virtuous image from all points of view – personal, social, economic – we tested that of creating a ring. Explanations and meeting.
Franceinfo Culture: How was the idea of opening your workshop to the public born?
Jordane Somville : My first boutique workshop, rue Ramey, opened in 2017, already offered introductory workshops. My clients have always been very sensitive to this idea and after the cessation of activity, during the confinement linked to the Covid pandemic, many of them came back wanting to spend some time with me behind the workbench. So I kept the formula in this new space open in June 2024.
You offer workshops for a maximum of four people per session, by reservation…
The shop is adapted with a workshop section. It has four stations aligned like in a school format. This is where I work on my jewelry part and at the back of the shop is the ceramic part with the cooking oven. When the jewelry is finished, it is installed directly in the store: I have the shortest possible circuit.
What can we see about the creation of your jewelry?
The workshop creating a silver ring includes, for example, eleven steps for its creation: everything begins with the choice of the model and the pattern adjusted to your finger, which will then be cut on the silver plate with a saw. metal. Next comes filing using metal files, the first with a wide edge, then with the needle file before using the Chamfer to round the corners. It is then the turn of the hammering, either with a hammer or with a hammer, before shaping the ring on a triboulet first with the fingers then with a wooden mallet. Final step, satin or mirror polishing. I also offer a 4-hour workshop where the student comes to create freely from A to Z and this year, I am opening this place to other participants to have new creative angles and exchanges.
Is porcelain one of your favorite materials?
Porcelain was love at first sight thanks to meeting the ceramist Marie Drouot during my visit to her workshop in Ménilmontant for training. This material is very instinctive and allows me to quickly put my creative ideas in place, like in my first collection. Gold rush where I tore off small pieces from the lump of porcelain earth to express myself, without sculpting it. I work very little on sketches, it’s more the material that invites me to form. I was a jewelry stylist and I did a lot of drawings: then, I wanted to reverse the process and obtain the aesthetic result then refine and smooth it in a second step.
This material considered fragile, how do you work with it so that it remains resistant? ?
Porcelain is fragile when it is worked in thin thicknesses. I work on it more massively and the enamel, with which I coat it, gives it good resistance to impact. The finishes vary from matte to glossy, thanks to the chosen enamelling and can be monochrome or have color gradients reminiscent of watercolors. In addition, given that they are jewelry, they remain small volumes and therefore less fragile than larger objects like plates or bowls.
I have been working in this medium for eleven years, but for the past five years, I have been trying to exploit it on a large scale also with the partnership with the Makeba architect’s house located in Toulouse. The artist, interior designer, invites people into her space where she lives to come and work with her. She really likes ceramics, wood, textiles and painting. It’s a sort of museum showroom: we’re close to the art objects. When I do residencies there, I pick in the forest, then I make prints of these collected plants to create tableware. Makeba’s idea is to involve artists in its environment.
You also make jewelry with preserved flowers that are treated to maintain their beauty and freshness over time. How is it going?
I first started with real plants, but that requires large, more sculptural pieces like my piece Armor welcoming pothos (a plant) on each shoulder as an epaulette. I turned to preserved flowers to be able to offer smaller things combined with crumpled porcelain to work on a more mineral than vegetal spirit. It is possible to place certain “high cutting” jewelry in foam soaked in water to have, for the duration of an event, a small, fresh bouquet on you.
Your workshop also welcomes a fashion designer. Do you like artistic collaborations?
I work here with Thomas Varennes, creator of the Mojo No Fomo brand : he assists me as artistic director and helps me on the store’s display [la façon de présenter les produits]. He makes clothes with dormant fashion house stocks, they are unique pieces. Yes, collaborations mean a lot to me: I also work, for example, with a painter and tattoo artist friend. I find that if you work on an idea alone, after a while, it can be confined to a single angle of view. The fact of inviting artist friends, of being in a collaborative work approach, this opens the spectrum and allows us to have other angles.
